Tracy Baxter: Middletown man helps kids make right choices

Wade Young knows he lucked out. Big time. Not many teens who decide to drop out of high school during the middle of their senior year end up with top jobs in major companies.

Comment

By Tracy Baxter

recordonline.com

By Tracy Baxter

Posted Apr. 29, 2014 at 2:00 AM

By Tracy Baxter
Posted Apr. 29, 2014 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

Wade Young knows he lucked out. Big time. Not many teens who decide to drop out of high school during the middle of their senior year end up with top jobs in major companies.

Three decades later, Young would become the first African-American to reach an executive-level position with Dress Barn.

These days, he's using what he picked up along his against-the-odds journey to help some of our region's at-risk kids.

Young had plenty in common with today's troubled teens back then. Bullied throughout his teenage years in his hometown of Stamford, Conn., he decided the right move was to quit school.

Fortunately for him, Dad made sure there would be no loafing around the house. The choice was offered — find work or get back in school. Young found employment unloading trucks for Dress Barn, earning the princely sum of a-buck-89 an hour. He hung onto the job for dear life.

Wade gradually rose through the ranks. Along the way he took night classes, getting that high school diploma, then graduating summa cum laude from college with an associate degree in business management.

Retirement came two years ago, along with a move to Middletown. It's home base for what has become his life's mission — talking with young men and women about character, behavior, respect for others and responsibility.

Young doesn't need to look far to find fatherless minority youngsters not lucky enough to have what he had growing up — a few significant male role models.

He worries many more will be lost to the streets and the prison system.

It's why he founded Right Choices Inc., a nonprofit organization with the goal of pointing at-risk teens toward positive life-changing decisions.

The Right Choices message has been finding its way into some of our local schools and community centers. Young says there's no script or lecturing. Instead, he tries to get kids to open up and talk about the peer-pressure challenges they're currently facing and the bad decisions they may have already made that need to be overcome.

Invariably, those conversations shift to a discussion of the wrong choices that were made by the guest speaker — a guy who used to steal money from his mom and dad and gave up on school before figuring things out and beginning a journey of redemption. All the while, the kids are reminded that school is anything but a waste of their time.

Young is hoping to meet and talk with more kids in more schools and community centers — anywhere his voice can be heard and the message passed on.

The Right Choices phone number is 746-7008.

And for Young, his new mission includes plenty of homework. He's got an 8-year-old to help raise and steer toward right choices.